Your final major paper of the year is designed to assess you in a number of ways. The project aims to put more of both the choice and responsibility for your learning in your hands, in part as preparation for the Capstone next year, and in part to emphasize the school’s character focus on scholarship (not as measured by grades, but by innate curiosity and desire to learn for the sake of learning).
Likewise, this paper is meant to assess (and challenge) your abilities to synthesize multiple literary texts into a larger, more complex argument than the shorter papers we’ve written thus far.
Your finished paper should be 8-10 pages in length (using 11 point Times New Roman or Average font and the default margins in GoogleDocs), should include a Works Cited page (this page can count toward the page count), be academic in tone, and follow all other MLA guidelines. In terms of scope, the essay requires you to discuss your two independent book choices, while incorporating one other text from our reading this year. Each book should be given about equal time in terms of discussion (rather than the paper focusing on just one and mentioning the other in passing), but we probably don’t want to divide the paper into two mini-papers where we discuss one book for four pages, and then turn to the other book for the second half. The point here is to argumentatively weave the texts together.
I will not supply any specific prompt, since every student has unique book choices and personal areas of interest. But on a general level, the paper needs to make an argument about how your texts reflect ideas about American culture, values, ways of thinking, literary trends, etc., ideas that we’ve talked about over the course of the year and ideas that you’ve learned about in US History. You might look back at our prompts this year to jog your memory, or to look at possible ways of thinking about your books. I think you’ll see that I’ve asked variations on similar themes throughout, and that I often ask you to talk about one text in terms of another, which is a strong strategy.
In terms of structure, remember that structure is dependent on your argument, not the other way around, so figure out your argument prior to determining a structure.
Putting together a coherent argument that incorporates multiple texts over a large span of years will require you to think about texts we’ve already read while reading your first text, and all we’ve read and the first and while reading the second. This means that you should be annotating, taking notes, and marking important passages and quotations.
That was the guideline, this paper should seek to explain how the use of identity reflect ideas about American culture, values, ways of thinking, and literary trends. This papershould directly analyze and use relevant in text citations to emphasis the points being made. These citations should come from Frederick Douglass’ narritave, Native Son, and the Color Purple. Deep knowledge of these texts is required to write this paper.